


Lover Turned Bloodthirsty

by voleuse



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-17
Updated: 2007-12-17
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:28:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voleuse/pseuds/voleuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>It is easy to leave scorched earth in your wake if you don't look back.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Lover Turned Bloodthirsty

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for 4.03, 4.07, and 4.09. Title, summary, and headings adapted from Jennifer Moxley's _The Logic of Survival_.

_With age and experience  
he had learned the essential:  
when time is running out  
it's best to ignore your conscience._

 

More than three hundred of his people lived in the Pegasus Galaxy, and Ronon had watched three of them die. They had not been enemies, but friends, and it might as well have been his hand that slew them.

When he had lived, had traveled, on his own, Ronon had thought himself stripped of regret. He had shorn it, along with guilt and trust and joy. He had distilled himself to the necessary: survival, and revenge.

Atlantis was haven to him, and maybe even home, but he discovered his essential mistake too late. Having resources, having a team, didn't mean he would always win. (A part of him, the largest part, denied the realization, tried to shout it down.) Having a team simply meant he would have that many more people to mourn, in the end.

Ronon had learned, at long last, to distrust hope.

_So loss will come and we will die  
from one generation to the next.  
Landscapes won't be recognized  
and humans will adapt, because  
that's what they're born to do._

 

At night, Teyla often woke, her hand on her belly, the names of each one of her people choking her in the dark. Her mind echoed with dreams, and with the whispers of the Wraith, meditating levels down, corridors away.

The Wraith never tried to speak to her, but she could hear him nonetheless. She wondered if, blade in her hand, she could make him find her people.

With the galaxy's war, the lost Athosians have not been a Lantean priority--nor, she assured Colonel Carter, should they be. A poor leader she would be, to uproot her people once again in order to assuage her own worries.

There were rumors. There were whispers to be chased down. Teyla told herself these grew from truth's seed, and Teyla told herself they survived, at least in part.

Across the table in the mess hall, Ronon watched her, and she pretended, for the most part, that she did not know what he was thinking.

_The world is no longer a chess board,  
surprise attacks are few. All can see  
the long view: those who would  
preserve us will instead destroy us._

 

Some soldiers, in hushed whispers or proud boasts, could tell you exactly how many enemies they had killed, how many casualties they had caused.

John couldn't. Or, he could have, when he thought Earth was the only planet that mattered. Since he first stepped through the eye of the wormhole, though, he had lost count.

No. He had stopped counting.

Colonel Carter didn't smile at him after the briefing, and that was a relief. Her eyes skimmed over the report, and he wondered whether Keller could expand on Carson's retrovirus research without turning him, yet again, into a bug.

The Lantean network's collection of movies had expanded tenfold in the past few months. In the dead of night, John liked to watch old monster movies and guess which one he'd have to live through next. Vampires, swamp things, robots, zombies.

He used to watch westerns, when he first came to Atlantis. He didn't anymore.


End file.
